Menu

Enlightenment Through Understanding

The Daily View: Dumbing-Down the SAT, Matt Levine, China Bubble

June 19, 2015

The left picks and chooses the science they want to believe in. Science of man-made global warming? Yes. Science of natural global warming? Umm..maybe not. Science of individual cognitive differences? Hell no. That’s why the welfare left, in contrast to the neo/pragmatic left, for the past few decades has been waging war on IQ and the SAT, trying discredit such tests as ‘racist or class-discriminatory’ since the results could be interpreted to mean some individuals are cognitively superior to others. The welfare left is trying to lower standards, making each iteration of the SAT increasingly easy until it becomes useless at its original intended functions: singling out exceptional talent and assessing college readiness. The losers in this ‘dumbing down’ are the gifted poor, among the people who stand to benefit the most from the SAT and IQ tests since such tests, if well-constructed, should be hard to coach and have a high score-ceiling, allowing gifted and talented individuals form all socioeconomic backgrounds st stand-out from the masses. But instead, the left prefers equal outcomes over equal opportunity, and even though they go to great lengths to present themselves as champions of the later, their actions suggest otherwise.

You can buy private-company shares, but you can’t usually sell them short, which might contribute to bubbly overvaluation in the private markets. (This complaint is to some extent the opposite of the previous one.) A public prediction market, open to everyone, big and small, long and short, could solve both of those problems.

Matt, who is a liberal, actually thinks that allowing the short selling of hot web 2.0/app companies could make prices go lower, but in actually this would have the opposite effect, as short sellers have to scramble to buy back the shares in panic as prices keep going up. Oh, you think Snapchat is a bubble at $4 billion…now it’s worth $40 billion. Enjoy your 900% loss. The idea of a retail investor losing 900% of their money in an extremely illiquid market sounds really awful. Matt is one of those people who thinks that adding a string of footnotes to the end of his article makes him sound smart, when in reality he’s clueless most of the time.

Hasn’t the left predicting this since 2005, to no avail? A simple Google search yields 100′s of failed predictions – predictions made by experts – of China’s ‘inevitable’ economic doom, some of these articles going as far back as a decade. China’s stock market is merely playing catch-up for lagging since 2008. It’s still lower than it’s peak made nearly eight years ago, despite huge growth since then. With 7%-10% average yearly GDP growth, the size of China’s economy has nearly doubled since 2007. Therefore, it should not be a surprise to see the market rise as a consequence.

But the enduring popularity of Chinese bubble folklore is motivated not by a genuine pursuit of the truth, but by an internalized, personal desire – some combination of jealousy, fear, and envy – to see China’s economy fail. Journalists and their readers see China’s stock market going vertical; they see stories of Chinese millionaires and billionaires binge-buying expensive American real estate as average Americans are getting foreclosed, stories about China’s ‘new rich’ sending their kids to elite American schools – and all of this evokes jealousy that the Chinese are doing better than they (the readers) are, or fears that the Chinese are taking jobs. And maybe these fears are well-founded, but it doesn’t in any way lend evidence to China’s economy being a bubble.